Author: Eloise Grace Henshaw

The end is near…

Eloise Grace Henshaw / / Nova Inventa

Today we met to go over what we want to do for our final piece and we are now excited by the way in which everything seems to have fallen together.

We have now decided to use different materials in our performance after the feedback about the noise of the pen on the cardboard boxes. We decided that in order to write on the boxes, it looked more effective with the use of paint.

Whilst we were working with paint, we thought that painting roman numerals worked well in the space. As time and seasons were two of the things we originally began to explore at the beginning of the module, we thought it was relevant.

We managed to bring better boxes than we had used before and successfully fill the space. It was nice to see all of our plans coming together and the finishing product looked better than we could have hoped.

 

 

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E x p e r i m e n t a l D.r.a.m.a

Eloise Grace Henshaw / / Uncategorized

Over the past few weeks, we have done lost of experimenting and decided as a group to incorporate some of these ideas in to our piece.

EXPERIMENTAL DRAMA:

Some of the ideas that can be seen here a discussed further in our previous blogs.

EXPOSURE: Our intention was to look in to the way in which we can focus on exposing a space, a secret or some kind of revelation through our piece.

How we incorperated this in to our work: The way in which the piece works, allows us to expose ‘something’ (which you will see if you come to our performance!). As a group, we feel that we have managed to build suspense in our piece and end it in a climatical way

OBSCURITY: As a group, we explored different ways in which to incorporate obscurity in to our performance.

How we incorporated this in to our work: The performance itself is obscure. Out intentions from our performance are not explicitly obvious.

LIFE AS ART: From the offset, our key interest was looking in to what it means to have life be art.

How we incorporated this in to our work: In our performance, we feel like we explore the idea of the fine line between art and drama.

Although at times we felt like each lesson we had different ideas and we were getting nowhere, we finally feel as a group, all of our experimentation throughout the term has finally paid off.

One of the reasons behind our chosen style of performance can be summed up in this quote:

‘ Site-specificity, then, can be understood in terms of this process, while a site-specific work; might articulate and define itself through properties, qualities or meanings produced in specific relationships between an object or event and a position it occupies.’ (Site-Specific Art, Nick Kaye)

 

As a group, we have focussed on our performance taking place in a museum, specifically the contemporary art gallery. Through this we were able to develop our ideas and knew that our performance needed an artistic twist in order to make it differ from other performances.

 

S h o w c a s e feedback

Eloise Grace Henshaw / / Nova Inventa

Today we were able to show what we have decided to do for our performance.

It was a helpful session as we were able to get feedback from the rest of the group and insight in to what worked about our piece and what did not.

Good:

– It engaged the audience and made them think about their own meanings of the piece

– The simplicity is effective, less is more

^^this was something we were happy to hear as we had taken this from Site-Specific Art by Nick Kaye:

‘minimalism in site-specificity can be said to begin in sculpture, yet reveal itself in performance, a move which calls into question its formal as well as spatial location.’

– The words read over the performance add intrigue to the action

Concerns:

– The use of the pens on cardboard distracted from the words read due to noise

– the words written on the boxes were overly obvious ‘baby #2’ and ‘why is this happening?’

– The link between the film installation and out performance – was it too much?

We are going to look in to these feedback comments and work on our performance further.

P e r f o r m a n c e snippit

Eloise Grace Henshaw / / Development, Nova Inventa

After all of the bizzarre things we have tried out (see other members of the group’s blogs for more detail), we thought in preparation for our performance, we could share with you a brief outline of our script.

Not revealing too much…

 

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Hairbrushes, dollys and  brand new frocks

Dentist visits, tears and knee high socks

Late night dinner, eavesdropping, being a great friend

doing what you love, midnight calls and knowing what’s around the bend

sight seeing, grazed knees, crying tears of joy

cigarettes, make up sex, the excitement of a girl or boy

nameless faces, finding your lover, learning things anew

building foundations, learning from mistakes and being sad when it’s through

office chairs, nails clippers and doing a job you hate

interlocking fingers, building blocks, loving some one when it’s too late.

Hide and Seek, bed time tales, making a den

New school jumpers with hair to match, – biggest worries when ten.

Missing the cracks, taking a risk, telling the time

Seeing to believe, storm clouds, forgetting the punch line

Stability

Loyalty

Something to call my own

There’s no place like home

one breath, that’s all it took

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We took inspiration from the installation found in the space that we are using for our performances.

Even during the first week at the collection, one of the things that I found added to the atmosphere of the collection was the sound wall, found in the main entrance. As you can see from the blog posts from the other members of the group, we experimented with sensory ideas, such as releasing marbles down the stairs in order to create a loud echoing noise that was almost unsettling in the space in which it was done.

After we decided that we would no longer be using all five spaces around The Collection and The Usher Gallery, we still used the ideas of the sound wall and a voice over in our piece.